Every business that depends on email faces the same hidden risk: what happens to inbound messages the moment your mail server goes offline? A server restart, an ISP outage, a maintenance window, or hardware failure can all make your mail server temporarily unreachable. Without a backup MX, sending servers retry for a while — then bounce the message back to the sender permanently. Email is lost. StrataMX Backup eliminates that risk entirely.
How MX Records Work
When someone sends you an email, their mail server performs a DNS lookup for your domain's MX (Mail Exchange) records. MX records list the servers that accept inbound mail for your domain, each assigned a priority number. Lower number means higher priority. The sending server always tries the highest-priority server first — and only falls back to lower-priority servers when the primary is unreachable.
yourcompany.com MX 10 mail.yourcompany.com (primary — highest priority) yourcompany.com MX 20 stratamx.infinitydatacenter.com (backup — fallback)
When the primary (priority 10) is reachable, 100% of mail goes there. When it is not reachable, sending servers automatically fall back to the backup MX at priority 20. The sender's server never bounces — it successfully delivers to the backup. From the sender's perspective, the message was accepted and delivered.
What StrataMX Backup Does
StrataMX Backup is Infinity Data Center's secondary MX server. When your primary mail server becomes unreachable, StrataMX accepts all inbound messages and holds them in a secure queue. When your primary server comes back online, StrataMX detects the recovery and delivers the queued messages in order — just as if the outage never happened.
StrataMX Backup works with any mail server or hosted email platform — StrataMail, Hosted Exchange, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, on-premise Exchange, or any SMTP-based system. It operates completely independently of your primary mail infrastructure.
Step-by-Step: During an Outage
- 1. Your primary mail server goes offline — hardware failure, ISP outage, maintenance window
- 2. A sending server tries to deliver to your primary MX (priority 10) — connection fails or times out
- 3. The sending server automatically tries StrataMX Backup (priority 20) — connection succeeds
- 4. StrataMX accepts the message and queues it securely in Infinity Data Center's infrastructure
- 5. Your primary server comes back online — StrataMX detects recovery automatically
- 6. StrataMX delivers all queued messages in order — no gaps, no lost email
Queue Retention & Delivery
StrataMX Backup holds queued email for an extended retention period — sufficient to cover planned maintenance windows, unexpected outages, and ISP incidents that can take hours or days to resolve. For most business environments, a five-day queue window is sufficient to cover any realistic outage scenario. Contact Infinity Data Center to discuss retention requirements for environments with extended maintenance schedules or known reliability constraints.
When SpamWeeder Premium is also active on the account, SpamWeeder acts as the front-line MX gateway with StrataMX Backup as the secondary — messages are filtered for spam before being accepted into the backup queue, preventing the backup from filling with junk during an outage.
Setup: Two DNS Records
Activating StrataMX Backup requires only a single additional DNS MX record pointing to Infinity Data Center's backup mail servers, at a priority number higher than your primary MX. Infinity Data Center's team provides the exact record to add and can assist with the DNS change if needed. DNS propagation typically completes within a few hours. No changes are required to your primary mail server or any other infrastructure.
StrataMX Backup is compatible with any domain registrar and any DNS provider. It can be added to an existing email setup without any service interruption.
Who Needs StrataMX Backup?
Any organization that cannot afford to lose inbound email — which is most businesses. Specific scenarios where StrataMX pays for itself immediately:
- Planned maintenance windows — take your mail server down for updates without telling clients their email will bounce
- ISP outages — your server is running fine but your upstream connection is down
- Hardware failures — unexpected server issues that take hours to diagnose and resolve
- Office relocations — connectivity disruptions during a physical move
- Software migrations — brief downtime during a platform change or upgrade
StrataMX Backup is especially valuable for organizations running on-premise mail servers, where downtime is more frequent than in hosted environments. It is also an essential add-on for StrataMail accounts — even cloud-hosted platforms have maintenance windows where backup MX provides an additional safety net. Contact us or call 866.790.4678 to add StrataMX Backup to your account.